Note 300 — 1837.

Pages 51 and 57, notes, 1st part, 2nd edit. It may be tolerated to mention the instances in which Lanyon figured, to deserve the record. In October, 1828, he finished a parallel in very easy soil of 262 cubic feet in 2 hours and 41 minutes, whilst an able-bodied sapper, unskilful at the pickaxe and the shovel, only completed the same content of excavation in 8 hours and 4 minutes! Thirty men were employed at the same time at similar tasks, the result of whose labours showed that for each man, strong and trained, it required to execute the work an average period of 4 hours and 54 minutes. The other instance refers to his completing the first task of a parallel, nearly 109 cubic feet, in easy soil in 16 minutes. In the Peninsula sieges, no more than 42 cubic feet of excavation appears to have been excavated by each individual of the military working parties as his first night’s work; but at the rate which rendered Lanyon celebrated, an active workman in these sieges ought to have finished his first night’s task in seven minutes! The comparison makes the difference so excessive, that credulity has scarcely sufficient tension to accredit it; but coming from an authority so proverbial for his accuracy, there is no alternative but to wonder at the achievements of the man who so signalized himself as a sapper; and to add, with the Colonel, the expression of mortification, “that the exertions of the British army should have fallen so miserably short of their brilliant exploits in the field.”